Whatever floats your model boat .. but there’s more to life
Inever wanted to be an engineer or a technical expert in anything. Friends, relatives, colleagues and my computer repair man will see that as one of those statements of the bleeding obvious but it’s only fair to mention it to those who want to know my qualifications for writing about old machinery or new technology.
The answer is, clearly, that my qualifications are not good beyond the fact that, like the majority of our species using any kind of equipment, as long as it does what we want it to do, we’re happy. No need to star t exploring how it works. That’s how you get into trouble.
Jerome K Jerome of Three Men in a Boat fame knew that more than a century ago when he wrote the less well known but equally funny Three Men on the Bummel, “Bummel” being a German word for a cycling tour.
In an early chapter he describe show he, and most others, are happy if a bicycle gets them from A to B. But the tinkerer want to “improve” its performance, take it apart, do things to it until it performs badly, uncomfortably and with several ball-bearings from the front wheel left over.
Jerome concluded, rightly, that you can’t do both with the same bicycle. You can ride or you can tinker. That is true and extends, as far as I can see, to things such as classic cars, small boats and old tractors.
Think about the average marina. How many of those boats do you ever see at sea? They’re either floating idly or being tinkered with and tar ted up. Ditto most classic cars. How
many actually go? And double ditto vintage tractors.
Some move, I grant you. But, as with steam engines and railway engines, enthusiasts spend far more time working on them covered in oil and grease and sucking grazed knuckles than they ever manage to spend driving them. And when they do try to get them to move, how much time is spent on running repairs?
Let’s be fair. As I’m much more tolerant about the affairs of others than I used to be in my volatile, impatient youth, how people spend their time is up to them as long as they don’t upset anyone else or frighten the horses.
As I said to a friend: “If people want to have model train sets or sail model boats or work on vintage tractors or classic cars, good luck to them.”
Friend, after pause: “I’m making a model of an antique lyre…”
It seems the market for arcane technology is limit less. Any second hand book seller will confirm that their regular best-selling section is the one to do with railways and steam engines and the main clientele for it men of a certain age.
A walk along the shelves of any WH Smith will confirm the railway demand, plus the demand for magazines about old tractors and cars. Or classic and vintage if you prefer. The main requirement for any of them is lot s of photo - graphs. It’s like the magazines of another kind that used to be kept on the top shelf – so I’m told – before their contents began to appear in greater detail online.
I guess full-frontal online classic tractor sites also exist, along with DVDS to go with the magazine features. Of course they do. The long winter nights must fly by.
What is it that attracts men – it’s almost invariably men – to old tractors which when we had to drive them for a living were op en to the weather, caused hearing and back problems, and gave us enough diesel fumes to cause more lung problems than the cigarettes most of us smoked?
There’s the rub, because I’m a sucker for a display of old tractors, vying with the rest of the crowd such a display attracts to say how many of them I drove. That means I’m grateful to the enthusiasts who spend years working on these tractors, getting them to run at least spasmodically, painting and polishing.
But I still think there must be more to life.